stars carefully folded from notebook pages filled with nightmares.
She drops the stars in the far corners, leaving her fears behind bookshelves and tucked into vases. Scattering them in hidden constellations.
(She does this with books as well, removing the pages she does not care for and sending them off into the shadows where they belong.)
(The cats play with the stars, batting bad dreams or uncomfortable prose from one hiding place to another, changing the patterns of the stars.)
The girl forgets the dreams once she lets them go, adding to the long list of things she does not remember: What time she is meant to go to bed. Where she puts books she starts but does not finish. The time before she came to this place. Mostly.
Of the before time she remembers the woods with the trees and the birds. She recalls being submerged in bathtub water and staring up at a flat white ceiling, different from the ceilings here.
It is like remembering a different girl. A girl in a book she read and not a girl she was herself.
Now she is a different thing with a different name in a different place.
Bunny Eleanor is different from regular Eleanor.
Regular Eleanor wakes up late at night and forgets where she is. Forgets the difference between things that have happened and things that she read in books and things she thinks maybe happened but maybe did not. Regular Eleanor sometimes sleeps in her bathtub instead of her bed.
The girl prefers being a bunny. She rarely removes her mask.
She opens doors she has been told not to open and discovers rooms with walls that tell stories and rooms with pillows for naps embroidered with bedtime stories and rooms with cats and the room with the owls she found once and never again and one door she has not managed to open yet in the burned place.
The burned place she found because someone put shelves in front of it tall enough to keep big people out but not small bunny girls and she crawled under and through.
The room contained burned books and black dust and something that might once have been a cat but was not anymore.
And the door.
A plain door with a shiny brass feather set into the center, above the girl’s head.
The door was the only thing in the room not covered in black dust.
The girl thought maybe the door was hidden behind a wall that burned away with the rest of the room. She wonders why anyone would hide a door behind a wall.
The door refused to open.
When Eleanor gave up due to frustration and hunger and walked back to her room the painter found her, covered in soot, and put her in a bath but did not know what she had been up to because the fire was before the painter’s time.
Now Eleanor keeps going back to look at the door.
She sits and stares at it.
She tries whispering through the keyhole but never receives a response.
She nibbles on biscuits in the darkness. She doesn’t have to remove her bunny mask because it doesn’t cover her mouth, one of many reasons why the bunny mask is the best mask.
She rests her head on the floor, which makes her sneeze, but then she can see the tiniest sliver of light.
A shadow passes by the door and disappears again. Like when the cats pass by her room at night.
Eleanor presses her ear against the door but hears nothing. Not even a cat.
Eleanor takes a notebook and a pen from her bag.
She considers what to write and then inscribes a simple message. She decides to leave it unsigned but then changes her mind and draws a small bunny face in the corner. The ears are not as even as she would like but it is identifiable as a bunny which is the important part.
She rips the page from the notebook and folds it, pressing along the creases so it stays flat.
She slips the paper under the door. It stops halfway. She gives it an extra push and it passes into the room beyond.
Eleanor waits, but nothing happens and the nothing happening becomes quickly boring so she leaves.
Eleanor is in another room, giving a biscuit to a cat, the note half forgotten, when the door opens. A rectangle of light spills into the soot-covered space.
The door remains open for a moment, and then it slowly closes.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS half wakes underwater with the taste of honey in his mouth. It makes